


Gimme Three Steps

by ireallyhatecornnuts (CharleyFoxtrot)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angelic Grace, Crack, M/M, Supernatural Spring Fling 2014, Wings, angel!dean, kind of?, spn spring fling 2014
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-24
Updated: 2014-04-24
Packaged: 2018-01-20 15:02:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1514771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CharleyFoxtrot/pseuds/ireallyhatecornnuts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was an accident, because that was their luck.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gimme Three Steps

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kingzgurl](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=kingzgurl).



> Written for kingzgurl at the SPNspringfling, working within these prompts:
> 
> Pairings  
> 1: Dean Winchester/Castiel  
> 2: Misha & Jensen, gen  
> 3: Castiel/Crowley
> 
> Prompts  
> a: manifested wings  
> b: shenanigans (including pie!)  
> c: road trip
> 
> Unbeta'd (I am so sorry!) but with the italics fixed from the SPN Spring Fling posting.
> 
> As usual, you can find me at my tumblr, disease-danger-darkness-silence.tumblr.com.

Sam knew, with the unerring instinct of a younger brother, that Dean was angry.

It wasn’t just the way he stormed about the bunker, or the way his voice had a sharp edge to it. It wasn’t even the way he deliberately made Sam’s food portions smaller, like maybe that would provoke Sam into a fight. Dean could never _not_ take care of the people he considered family, even when he was murderously furious with them, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t the master of passive aggression.

But it was there all the same: the time spent with headphones on, the time spent on the gun range, the time spent, very pointedly, out of the bunker and away from them.

Sam tried, and failed, to be annoyed with his brother. He was being a dick.

But for once, Sam was pretty sure Dean was justified.

 

 

It was an accident, because that was their luck.

Castiel happened to be at the bunker, which in itself was unusual. The theft of another’s grace seemed to make him unsure, nervous, even sick-looking at points, and he usually avoided the place, preferring to talk to the Winchesters over the phone (when he contacted them at all).

But even Castiel couldn’t ignore it when CNN started broadcasting a riot happening outside Omaha, just a few hours from them. Especially when a sharp-eyed Dean caught sight of Abaddon’s meatsuit, grinning gloriously from amid the chaos. The three of them were in the Impala and driving toward Omaha before an hour had passed.

And _how_ could they have known that Abaddon had somehow found Castiel’s grace, when it should have burned up in Metatron’s spell?

And they _definitely_ couldn’t have known that the grace Castiel had stolen would be forced from his body once his natural grace took hold.

Abaddon did. She knew that Castiel’s grace would seek him out once she freed it, knew that an angel could only contain the grace of _one_ angel, knew that the purloined grace, no longer an angel’s, would flee his body and seek the nearest host, willing or not.

She knew, too, that the Mark of Cain couldn’t mark something holy, that if Dean Winchester became suffused with grace, the Mark would burn itself off of him, like a rodent scurrying from the light.

 

 

Dean woke up in his room two days later. Every injury or scar he’d ever had was gone. The Mark, their only means to kill Abaddon, was _gone_.

“Get it out,” was his first order, deadpan. “I’ll find Cain and get the Mark again. Get it out of me.”

“I can’t,” Castiel said, apologetic. He glanced at Sam, who was trying not to make sympathetic noises. Cas looked like a kicked puppy.

The angel turned back toward Dean. “Theo’s grace was never meant to be contained by the Righteous Man, Dean. You were meant for an archangel.”

“I wasn’t meant for any of those dicks,” Dean said. His jaw was clenched tight.

“Genetically, you were,” Cas corrected. “You were too powerful a vessel for an angel like Theo. Your soul subsumed it.”

Dean stared at him. “In _English_ , Cas.”

Castiel sighed and shrugged. “Theo’s grace merged with your soul, Dean. I couldn’t extract it now, not even if I wanted to.”

There was a beat of silence, cold and terrible, and Dean shot the two of them an angry glare before storming out of the room.

Sam, never one to ignore a chance for academic conjecture, voiced his question to the room at large.

“Does that make him Nephilim now?”

Cas shook his head. “The Nephilim were the result of an unholy union between a being of the Earth and a being of Heaven; their very presence is corrupt. The grace _sought Dean out_. There wasn’t anything unholy about it.” He paused. “He does probably have a lot of the same abilities now, however.”

“Just _great_ ,” Sam sighed. He sat down on Dean’s bed. “Just what we need: an angry Dean with angel-baby powers.”

“It’s probably not the most ideal situation,” Castiel agreed.

 

 

The first few days were rough. Lightbulbs liked to shatter at the slightest whim, and Dean couldn’t use anything electronic without it fritzing out on him. Even worse was the silence -- Dean was angry, and it was simmering under the surface, festering.

It was _terrible_ when he discovered that it was near-impossible for him to get drunk now.

Finally, though, a solid week after the altercation with Abaddon, something seemed to resolve itself within Dean. Physically, that is, because suddenly his powers were something he could harness with ease. He entertained himself by using telekinesis to chop all of the vegetables for spaghetti bolognese at once, or by annoying Sam and launching a thousand spitballs at him at once. After one last pleading glance from Sam, Cas gave in and offered to help Dean refine his control and, if necessary, use his newfound powers as a weapon.

Halfway through the session, Dean froze, staring behind Castiel.

“Dude. You have _wings_ ,” he said.

“I do,” Castiel said, calmly. “Possibly one of the only angels left in possession of them, since I did not Fall with my grace intact.”

“ _Dude_ ,” Dean insisted. “They’re _awesome_.”

Castiel raised an eyebrow and peered behind himself, smiling a bit. “What do they look like to you? I doubt you can see the real ones; your grace is probably filtering them into something less eye-melting.”

Dean blinked. “I dunno. Big? Like twice as big as you. Black feathers.” He squinted. “But they look....sharp?”

Cas nodded thoughtfully. “I’m assuming that the grace has settled within you, and your soul is becoming used to the addition. It’s healing, so to speak, and it’s unlocking more abilities the more you heal.”

“Huh,” Dean said, surprised. And then, “Wait, I’m not gonna grow wings, am I?”

“I don’t know,” Castiel replied. “Your situation is not _entirely_ unheard of, but it is somewhat unusual. And undocumented.”

“I don’t want wings, dude.”

“If you develop wings, I highly doubt they’ll be physical,” Castiel said. With a shrug of his left wing, he turned back to the task of helping his friend learn to wield his powers.

 

 

Two boring hunts and several long drives later, Castiel froze in the middle of the grocery store. Sam, who’d brought the angel along to Hastings mainly out of boredom, turned toward him. “What’s up?”

“I’m not sure,” Cas said, frowning. He looked up. “I will go check on Dean; you should meet me back at the bunker.”

Cas disappeared with the now-familiar-again sound of wingbeats, startling a small scream from an elderly woman who’d just come around the corner of the aisle.

Sam finished his shopping lightning-fast and was on his way back to Lebanon within a half hour.

 

 

Castiel reappeared in the center of the bunker, from which the disturbance originated, and stared at Dean.

“ _Oh_.”.

A human would say that Dean looked fine. And he did: nothing was physically wrong with him. _Metaphysically_ , however, there was a great deal going on. His grace, now a part of him, was struggling with his consciousness to do something it felt necessary.

“Dean,” Castiel said, carefully.

“Cas, what’s going on?” Dean asked. He was curled up in a ball on the floor, half under the table he and Sam used to conduct research. He looked like he wanted to crawl out of his own skin, which Castiel empathized with: half-itchy, half-nauseated, _all_ miserable. He was hunched over, his shoulders twitching spasmodically every few seconds, his body trying to react to something happening in a different plane of existence.

The angel squatted down next to his friend. “Dean,” he repeated. “You’re going to have to stop fighting it.”

Dean stared up at him.

“Stop fighting the wings,” Cas clarified.

Dean’s eyes bugged out and Cas got the idea that the only reason he wasn’t being punched was because of how preoccupied Dean was with the strange sensations he was experiencing. He found himself grateful; Dean couldn’t do him any real harm, but his fists packed a more powerful punch these days.

“I don’t want wings,” Dean said, after struggling with his control for several seconds. Directly after he said that, Castiel saw one of them form behind him, an unheard of mix of grace and human soul. Absently, he thought that it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

“I think it’s a little late for that,” Castiel said, staring at it.

“Goddamnit,” Dean said.

 

 

By the time Sam got back from Hastings with the shopping, Dean’s wings -- three of them, brown and gold, easily twice as tall as him, and each nearly twenty feet long -- had completely formed. Unfortunately, owing to their strange composition, Dean could briefly manifest them in the physical realm, which meant that Sam walked into a whirlwind of destruction from where his brother had accidentally knocked some thing or another over. Said brother was standing completely still in the middle of the room, eyes downcast and shoulders flexed.

“Whoa,” Sam said, taking in the mess. “What happened?” He blinked; the air around Dean sort of flickered, like a ghost, and Sam was instantly on the alert. Once he figured out what he was seeing, he gaped. “Dude, are those _wings_?”

Dean glanced up and glared. “Shut your piehole, I’m trying to concentrate.”

Cas appeared next to Sam. “Hello, Sam,” he said. “Dean is attempting to learn how to keep his wings from knocking things in the physical realm over. He’s getting very good.”

“Oh, my _God_ ,” Sam said. He rolled his head back, taking a few seconds to contemplate the ceiling, before muttering, “How is this our _life_ ,” and leaving the bunker entirely.

 

 

Hunts slowed to a standstill while Dean got used to his new metaphysical appendages; Sam took the occasional ghost or poltergeist, but Dean was out of commission.

Every day Cas tried to teach him some measure of control. Some days it was a success and some days a failure, but slowly the hunter got the hang of keeping them under wraps.

It’d been days since the last visualisation mishap, so Sam wasn’t expecting Cas to (metaphorically) fly through the door of the main room like something was chasing him; by the look on his face, that wasn’t that far from the truth.

“What happened?” Sam asked, shooting out of his chair.

Cas looked grim. “Dean, ah, _flew_.”

Sam stared at him. “What.”

“He flew,” Castiel repeated. “I have no idea where he went.”

“Wait, he just disappeared?” Sam asked, panic starting to rise.

Cas nodded. Sam opened his mouth to ask more questions when his phone began to ring; he was flooded with a sense of relief when his caller ID told him that Dean was calling.

“Dean, _where are you_ ,” he started, only to be interrupted by a string of profanity. He pulled the phone away from his ear; Castiel looked impressed by Dean’s vocabulary, so Sam handed him the phone.

“Dean,” Cas said. The swearing on the other end of the line immediately ceased, and Sam glared at Cas, who shrugged back. “Where are you?” There was a moment of chattering and then Cas snorted in amusement. “Can you try to come b-- Dean, _you have wings_. There is nothing to be afraid of.” More chattering, to which Cas rolled his eyes. “Just come back, Dean. We are not driving from Kansas to Nevada when you can just as easily fly back. Do what you did before.”

“For _fuck’s sake_ \--” came Dean’s voice, only it was from right next to Sam, who jumped and flailed comically before plummeting to the floor. Dean, who looked stunned, held a hand down to help his brother up.

“I told you,” Castiel said, calmly hanging up his phone.

 

 

It was a month later when Dean accidentally killed Abaddon, who showed up at an old, run-down motel in Muncie, Indiana while they were trying to acquire Gabriel’s old archangel blade. The theory was that Dean, housing angelic grace and a soul, could sort of use the archangel’s blade with his soul as backup power. Castiel had been full of dire warnings about this, because there was a small chance Dean’s soul could burn out, but then Abaddon showed up and it all quickly became less than academic.

Dean slept for a solid day and then woke up as good as new. Sam, who was aching and tired and had driven everyone home, kind of hated him for it. He spent the day blasting Fall Out Boy in revenge.

 

 

Sam should have seen it coming, really, because there had always been this weird tension between Dean and Castiel, and suddenly they were spending lots of time alone and twining wings or whatever the hell it was angels and near-angels did, and now with no looming apocalypse over their shoulders.

But he _didn’t_ , and so he was honestly surprised to see Castiel pinning Dean into his bed, both of them half-undressed and Cas with his hand down Dean’s pants, when he barged into Dean’s room to announce that Jody thought she had a case they needed to take care of. Dean’s wings, which he normally was so careful to hide, were fully manifested, making the situation even more awkward; Castiel had his other hand buried in the feathers of the lower left wing and Sam had to desperately derail his thought process to ensure he didn’t wander down the road of his brother’s terrifying list of kinks.

“Uh,” Sam said, because what _else_ do you say in that situation? Dean let out a sort of indignant, embarrassed squawk before disappearing entirely. Castiel face-planted into the bed, filling the space Dean had so recently occupied, and then propped himself up, glaring at Sam.

“Right,” Sam said, backing out. “ _You_ go find him.”

He closed the door behind himself and resolutely sat down in front of his laptop, where Jody’s face waited expectantly from the Skype call.

“Jody,” he said, slowly. “Do you think Hallmark makes ‘Congrats on the new angel boyfriend’ cards?”

 


End file.
